Jacob Riis was unique and valuable as a police reporter because he dug into his statistics, news and information and used the power of fact as "the mightiest lever of this or of any day." [How the Other Half Lives, 1890]
"It was my task to cover ... all the news that means trouble to someone: the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort, before it gets into court."
-Jacob Riis, The Making of an American, 1901
Riis starts to dig deeper into the slums in the 1880's.
He developed the idea that poverty was the result of environmental conditions; not individual or moral failures, which formed the basis of "Naturalism." |
"The most pitiful victim of city life is not the slum child who dies, but the slum child who lives. Every time a child dies, the nation loses a prospective citizen, but in every slum child who lives, the nation has a probable consumptive and possible criminal." -Jacob Riis (1890)
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